The HIStalk Advisory Panel is a group of hospital CIOs, hospital CMIOs, practicing physicians, and a few vendor executives who have volunteered to provide their thoughts on topical industry issues. I’ll seek their input every month or so on an important news developments and also ask the non-vendor members about their recent experience with vendors. E-mail me to suggest an issue for their consideration.
If you work for a hospital or practice, you are welcome to join the panel. I am grateful to the HIStalk Advisory Panel members for their help in making HIStalk better.
This question this time: Is your organization running or planning telehealth projects?
Assuming the term telehealth includes scope of technologies included in the HRSA definition, we run remote ICU monitoring across our WAN. In addition, we continue to expand the use of mobile clinics that roam around our geography. These clinics include videoconferencing between clinic providers, patients, and remote specialists. We are planning additional work with a national telehealth provider.
No, my organization is still struggling to implement CPOE, keep the beds full, reduce readmissions, etc., etc., and we have not got that far yet.
This shows up in our annual strategic plan every year and it’s there this year too. But I haven’t been able to generate much interest among my medical staff, even the members who travel hundreds of miles for outreach clinics. We run a telemedicine epilepsy clinic and we have the usual teleconferences, but that’s about it. So I’ve retained some consultants to explore options like e-visits, home monitoring, and video visits using webcams with the med staff.
We have a few telehealth services we consume for a couple of specialties. For example, we have a small pediatric hospital and will perform remote echoes with specialists at a leading children’s facility for special patient cases. We do not have any plans to provide any additional telehealth services within our organization or service areas at this time.
Multiple coordinated efforts related to telehealth as we are approaching from a number of perspectives. More traditional eICU, using remote monitoring of multiple ICUs from a centralized location where critical care physicians and other clinicians are monitoring beds across multiple hospitals. Tele-psych consults in our emergency departments. Developing newer capabilities for virtual ambulatory visits, more acute or urgent care conditions where audio/video is effective in connecting a patient and a provider. Our EMR is really helping with efficiency in this service area and also with tele-psych and ICU areas. The key being that tele-X software, hardware can help best facilitate the patient encounter but it’s important to realize our EMR is needed for order entry, documentation, communication with the local hospital pharmacy, etc.
We currently have a monitoring station set up in our ICU for pediatrics so that our patients can be “seen” by a specialist at a large teaching hospital in the state. We are currently proposing to provide healthcare services …read more
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